BULLSH!T: 50 Fibs that made South Africa — fuelling the ‘genocide’ fire

On 23 August 2018, a lie that had spent years splashing around the dark ether of right-wing circles was thrust into the mainstream. The person who did the thrusting was the president of the US.

Donald Trump tweeted this bit of disinformation to his 83 million followers: “I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.’ ” The tweet saw The Washington Post’s fact checker hand Trump four Pinocchios, its “absolute lie” rating.

Land is indeed South Africa’s boiling-hot potato. It’s also true that the government is considering plans to redistribute privately owned farms and that a land expropriation bill is making an agonising journey through Parliament. But the government is nowhere near pulling a Mugabe.

That’s not why Trump was awarded the Pinocchios, though. He got the long-nosed spanking for his trumped-up charge that white South African farmers are being killed wholesale, a claim that feeds the myth of a white genocide. But how did the president of a super-power become concerned about farm murders in a shithole country?

The fiction of the extermination of white Afrikaners had been inching closer to the mainstream since 2 February 1990, when FW de Klerk pulled a thread in Parliament and the National Party’s apartheid project began to unravel. Farm murders became a rallying cry for right-wingers to mount a propaganda campaign about a race war. The ANC leader Peter Mokaba’s “Kill the Boer” chant didn’t help, and thanks to EFF leader Julius Malema, Dubul’ ibhunu still reverberates in the platteland.

One of the chief peddlers of the white genocide fallacy is the apartheid flag-waving crooner Steve “Mr Pampoen” Hofmeyr. In the 1980s, he was an Afrikaans pop star and the country’s top-selling musician. Tannies gooi’ed their broekies at him and women found him “as irresistible as a cheeseburger” (an actual Hofmeyrism).

After democracy, though, he transformed from the boer Neil Diamond into the boer Malema, making bizarre statements and performing attention-grabbing race-baiting stunts. He insisted “blacks were the architects of apartheid” (whatever that means), threw his tickets to a U2 concert into the Jukskei River because Bono said it was okay to sing struggle songs, poured tea over a magazine editor and drove over his DStv decoder when MultiChoice cancelled him because of his racist trash talk.

Hofmeyr also tried to sock it to a puppet that made fun of him, accusing it of hate speech and going to court for a gagging order. It was a fair fight – after all, Hofmeyr is a puppet of the right wing. Chester Missing, his puppet foe, had the last laugh when the magistrate set aside the gag order and ordered Hofmeyr to pay his costs.

But before his barney with Chester, Hofmeyr made several false claims about farm murders in a 2013 Facebook post titled “My tribe is dying”. He wrote that Afrikaners were being killed like flies, a white farmer was slaughtered every five days and the number of whites killed by blacks would fill Soccer City.

Hofmeyr has had bad reviews but none as devastating as the take-down from the myth-busting organisation Africa Check, which systematically debunked each of his claims. He responded by doubling down, saying the situation was even worse than he initially thought. “I should have listened to the cries of my people. It WAS a genocide all along and they WERE dying like flies and, yes, the bodies could fill a sport stadium,” he insisted.

Hofmeyr had gleaned his exaggerated statistics from right-wing organisations and individuals who used them in international campaigns to draw attention to the plight of the endangered Afrikaner farmer. Their initiatives included writing to the pope and submitting a complaint of genocide to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Ernst Roets, the deputy CEO of a civil rights group for Afrikaners, AfriForum, went on a charm offensive in 2018 to meet foreign politicians sympathetic to the organisation’s cause. He struck propaganda gold when he appeared on American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on 15 May.

Carlson began the segment with this falsehood: “Well, now to a fascinating and significant story the media have all but ignored. South Africa is a diverse country but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse.” He said white farmers were being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders and claimed the government’s response had been to initiate the land-expropriation process.

He ran another segment three months later about a racist land grab. “The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has begun, and you may have seen this in the press, seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin colour,” Carlson said. The following morning Trump dispatched his “large scale killing of farmers” tweet* and the white genocide fiction bled from the lunatic neo-Nazi fringe into the mainstream. The myth is grist to the mill for American white supremacists who use it to fuel fears about immigrants and integration.

But as Africa Check told Hofmeyr, whites are not being ethnically cleansed. The overwhelming majority of murder victims are black, and even when it comes to farm attacks a significant number of victims are black farm workers. Africa Check also pointed out that despite sensational reports of escalating violence against white farmers, the long-term trend showed farm murders declining.

Right-wing groups say farm attacks are particularly brutal, which they believe proves they are racially motivated. Indeed, some are. Tragically, cold-blooded cruelty is all too common in a country with one of the world’s worst murder rates. However, research shows the motive in most farm attacks is robbery.

Farmers are vulnerable. They have guns and cash, they are often isolated and the government and the police aren’t doing enough to protect them. But there isn’t an organised, systematic attempt to exterminate them. Farm killings make up a small proportion of murders and farmers face no greater risk of being killed than anyone else. In fact, women are in far greater statistical danger of being murdered.

Fearmongers like Hofmeyr share misleading statistics, untrustworthy reports and fake photos of farm attacks, which circulate quickly on social media, spreading paranoia and mistrust, stoking racial tensions and fanning flames of division.

When Africa Check said Hofmeyr’s claims and statistics did not add up, he responded that “far more than facts, it is people’s emotions and experiences that matter, so ‘our people die like flies’ is still applicable, emotionally.” No, Steve, facts matter. Africa Check, checkmate! I would say more liedjies, fewer lies, Mr Pampoen, but I’ve heard your songs – so, just fewer lies, please.

Perhaps Africa Check should follow in The Washington Post fact checker’s footsteps and dish out Pinocchios to serial fibbers. The South African version of Pinocchios would be Hofmeyrs, and it’s only right that he should receive the inaugural dishonours: four Hofmeyrs for spreading white genocide porkies.

 * Trump’s SA farm murder tweet was a tiny ripple in the tidal wave of fibs unleashed during his first presidency. The Washington Post reckons he racked up a whopping 30,573 whoppers during his four years in office. DM

BULLSH!T: 50 Fibs That Made South Africa by Jonathan Ancer, is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.